So today I’m listening to a talk radio show and they entertain this caller who calls about her 9-year-old daughter. Seems “Lulu” is just plain evil. Her parents are aghast; they aren’t raising Lulu any differently than they’re raising their other kids, but apparently Lulu has some issues.
[ul]
[li]She literally tried to kill her younger brother. As in, the mom found her in the kitchen with a butcher knife in her hands and she had to fight with Lulu for several minutes while she extricated the knife from her hands.[/li][li]She’s kicked, smacked, bitten, and otherwise maimed her parents and siblings.[/li][li]She takes delight in vandalizing and destroying anything she can get her hands on.[/li][li]When her parents threaten to whoop her, she tells them to use the belt becuase it hurts more and she likes it that way; and to otherwise go fuck themselves :eek:.[/li][li]Oh, and she’s a perfect angel at school, around her grandparents, and around anybody but ther parents or her siblings.[/li][/ul]
Mama swears up and down that they aren’t aware of anything for Lulu to be reacting against. Mama & Dad aren’t abusive toward her, and several brief inspections of her body reveal no signs of abuse at the hands of anyone else. There have been no tragedies in her family to throw off her psyche. Repeated trips to different doctors have revealed nothing; she checks out OK pysically and nothing seems amiss in her brain.
For all intents & purposes, Lulu is just plain evil.
Now, I’m not naïve; I’m sure there’s more to this story than what I heard on the radio this morning. But if Lulu’s mama is telling the truth, then we have to rule out mental illness and conclude that this child is truly evil.
Can this be? What’s your humble opinion? Can a child turn out evil without any real cause?
perhaps this is the proverbial ‘hell’ that used to be beaten out of children?
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
or maybe the doctors are just plain old wrong, it has been known to happen.
Did she say something that wasn’t in the OP? Because in the OP you say she did horrible things and her parents didn’t abuse her. Ok. How does that rule out mental illness?
I guess that statement wasn’t clear. What I meant was, her CAT scans & whatnot have checked out OK and there have been no signs of a chemical inbalance or something. And I assume none of these child psychologists Lulu’s been to have gotten untoward results from whatever tests they’ve done to her. Girl’s just mean.
So … this kid has tried to kill siblings, hurt others, cause everyone around her a ton of pain and the child psychologists have gotten “no untoward results to any of the tests?”
This kid needs to see some better psychologists then.
I mean, sure, lab tests are fine and they can show SOME things that may indicate mental illness. But the in home experiencer is the #1 test and clearly shows something wrong somewhere. For instance, as I’ve said before, my two sons are both autistic, yet all laboratory tests that have been peformed show everything fuctioning normally. It’s only after seeing what happens in the home, school, and social environment that they were able to diagnose them correctly.
Speaking as a recently retired mental health professional, I would say that if I were presented with such a case, I would suspect severe trauma somewhere in the child’s life. The level of violence offered suggests some sort of aggression towards the child. If the social, physical, psychological etc environment seems OK, then I would look for the hidden. Given that the violence seems directed at the immediate family, but not school or extended family, I would be suspicious of sexual abuse within the family. I didn’t work with children, but in adults, such childhood behaviour patterns were later self-recognized as the child’s response to sexual abuse. This is not a diagnosis!, just a working hypothesis.
I don’t know that I buy into anyone, any age being evil. Behavior is evil or not, people aren’t.
It does sound like this is a profoundly disturbed child who needs lots of time with qualified psychological professionals. I find the fact her antisocial behavior is limited to being with her family and siblings is very odd. That sounds like this is a behavior no one else gets to see, so we’re just taking the family’s word for it?
It’s also telling that all of the information is coming from the mother. There’s the possibility that she may be in denial about abuse or may even be doing it herself and not realizing it. I strongly suspect that there is a lot more to this story than we’re being told.
I know I’m just a dumb kid in her first psychology class but the one thing that we’ve gone in depth with seems to be an awful lot like the situation you’re describing. The kid might not have properly bonded with her parents during her infancy which resulted in an insecure attachment. Attachment disorder can have a wide range of symptoms, many of which you described in the OP, that might be it. The kid isn’t evil, she just hasn’t been properly loved.
Ehhh…I dunno about that. “Hitler wasn’t a bad person–he just did bad things.”
That said, IF this little girl really did and said all the things in the OP, exactly as described, then sure, she sounds like Damien’s little sister and someone should throw some holy water on her and see if she screams. (I mean, I’m an atheist, but it couldn’t hurt to try.)
But–all we have is the testimony of someone who claims to be the mother of this alleged child calling a talk-radio show. I mean, I know, if you can’t trust talk radio, who can you trust? But it occurs to me that we have a spectrum of possibilities here, ranging from Mommy Dearest is telling the absolute truth; to Mommy Dearest is telling the truth, but left out the part about making little Regan be a crack whore from the age of four; to some sixteen-year-old thought it would be funny to call up the talk radio show and start makin’ stuff up.
I often tell my children that they are evil and must be destroyed, but they just roll their eyes at me and mutter about substandard resthomes…
When she was 14, my daughter ran up a 900 dollar phone bill that PacBell allowed me to pay off over 6 months. Evil? Acting out? Mentally disturbed? Crying out for attention? Or trying to call a Seattle garage band and giving all her friends my calling card number so they could win this 900 number prize thing to meet this band?